I didn't realize there were restored sections to The Thing... what parts?
I think they've been restored for a few years now -- at least since the 2003 DVD release. Link here.
I didn't realize there were restored sections to The Thing... what parts?
Believe it or not, I've never actually seen Close Encounters, I think I'll set the DVR for that one.
Well, The Mummy wasn't at all what I expected. Karloff was only wrapped in bandages for one scene, and was barely seen moving in that form. I guess the cliche image of the shambling, bandage-wrapped mummy comes more from the later films made in the '40s. Here, Imhotep spent most of the film in human disguise and was a very Dracula-like figure, using his hypnotic powers to dominate the will of the leading lady so as to make her his.
It was weird that the flashback sequences were undercranked like a silent movie. I always figured that the sped-up nature of the silent movies we've seen comes from playing them back at the later standard of 24 frames per second when originally they were presumably screened at a lower frame rate matching what they were filmed in (18 fps?). But this was made early enough in the era of talkies that people would've remembered the original playback speed -- yet here the flashbacks are deliberately undercranked, implying that even then, silent films were commonly perceived as playing faster than normal. I don't know what to make of that. (I wonder if it was done to give the flashback scenes a sense of being old, the way that later color films would do flashbacks in black and white or with a sepia tinge.)
They aired that one a few weeks ago. After seeing that I decided to get the 2000 remake with George Clooney and an all-star cast. That too was shot in black & white and had pretty much the same sets and dialogue.Otherwise for the week, we've got Fail Safe (1964) at noon Monday...
I'm trying to remember something I read about the original Mummy movie-- maybe that it originally wasn't even a Mummy, but more of an immortal being, like Richard Anderson in Night Strangler. I'll have to research when I get a minute....Oh, a quick bit of research confirms that the screenplay of The Mummy was written by John Balderston, the co-writer of the original Broadway stage adaptation of Dracula, and who also contributed to the screenplay of the Lugosi movie.
So any similarities to Dracula are hardly coincidental!![]()
They aired that one a few weeks ago. After seeing that I decided to get the 2000 remake with George Clooney and an all-star cast. That too was shot in black & white and had pretty much the same sets and dialogue.Otherwise for the week, we've got Fail Safe (1964) at noon Monday...
I'm trying to remember something I read about the original Mummy movie-- maybe that it originally wasn't even a Mummy, but more of an immortal being, like Richard Anderson in Night Strangler. I'll have to research when I get a minute....
That's exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks.I'm trying to remember something I read about the original Mummy movie-- maybe that it originally wasn't even a Mummy, but more of an immortal being, like Richard Anderson in Night Strangler. I'll have to research when I get a minute....
I did read on Wikipedia that the original treatment for the film was called Cagliostro and was about "a 3000-year-old magician who survives by injecting nitrates." But when it was assigned to screenwriter John Balderston, who had covered the opening of King Tut's tomb as a journalist and contributed to the Dracula and Frankenstein scripts, he reworked it into the form we know.
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